• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Silverstein 1 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES AURATIC WEAPONS, WORLD WAR II, AND CULTURAL HEGEMONY IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS BY MICHELLE SILVERSTEIN ADVISOR: CHRISTINE CHISM LOS ANGELES, CA MARCH 22, 2013 Silverstein 2 ABSTRACT Auratic Weapons, World War II, and Cultural Hegemony in The Lord of the Rings By Michelle Silverstein J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is suspended between the medieval and the modern world. In this thesis, I attempt to explore what makes this enormously popularly novel so indelibly relatable to modern audiences. To begin, I look at weapons as the crux between the medieval and the modern elements of the text through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura. By comparing the depiction of medieval weapons within the Song of Roland to similar weapons in The Lord of the Rings, I demonstrate that they differ in the level of aura they possess and their transferability between cultures. This difference indicates an impulse to preserve cultural distinctions. Within the context of the historical realities occurring while Tolkien was writing this novel, including World War II, fascism, and industrialization, the impulse to preserve cultural distinctions becomes a direct critique against cultural hegemony. Silverstein 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 2. PART I: TOLKIEN’S MEDIEVAL SOURCES: DIFFERENCES IN CULTURAL TRANSFERABILITY…………………….……………...8 3. PART II: MODERN RESPONSE: WAR, FASCISM, AND CULTURAL HEGEMONY…………………………………………………………………15 4. PART III: THE RING AS CULTURAL HEGEMONY………………………………...35 5. PART IV: CULTURAL HEGEMONY AND MODERN INDUSTRY…………………39 6. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………..…48 7. WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………..……..51 Silverstein 1 Introduction Ever since its publication between 1954 and 1955, The Lord of the Rings has been greeted with enormous popular success; in the critical sphere, the trilogy has received anywhere from glowingly positive to ruthlessly negative reviews. Regardless of its variable critical reception, the popularity of The Lord of the Rings has not waned over the past fifty years, even acquiring a whole new host of devotees with the release of Peter Jackson’s massively successful film adaptations in the early 2000s. While sheer popularity does not equate literary quality, it nevertheless suggests the unavoidable truth that The Lord of the Rings offers something deeply compelling and relevant to modern audiences. Nevertheless, many critics continue to perceive The Lord of the Rings as anti-modern or outdated (Curry 11). The world of Middle-earth does indeed bear a striking resemblance to the medieval world, but acknowledging this should not cause us to overlook the elements that make that world indisputably modern. Modern literature generally refers to writing that experimented with innovative styles and forms at the beginning of the 20th century, a period marked by the two World Wars (Chance, Modern 3). Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted dictum “make it new” became the anthem for this literary movement. Postmodern literature, a more nebulous category sometimes characterized by the “intentional questioning of strategies of representation,” generally applies to literature following the end of World War II (23). Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings between the extended period of 1937 to 1949, but the first seeds of his fictional world had already begun to sprout by 1916 (Carpenter 215). Because of the expansive time period in which Tolkien wrote, spanning across two World Wars and straddling the modern and postmodern literary periods, his works continually evade definitive categorization. While the novel does not necessarily fit comfortably in either the modern or postmodern literary periods, this paper argues Silverstein 2 that it is indelibly attuned to the anxieties of the “modern” era of history, which for the purpose of this paper will be defined as the 20th and 21st centuries. This paper attempts to reconcile some of the medieval and modern elements in The Lord of the Rings to demonstrate how this work responds to the concerns of the modern world. Ultimately, I will argue that The Lord of the Rings depicts medieval weapons in a way that preserves cultural divisions, and this emphasis on cultural autonomy operates as a critique against the threat of cultural hegemony imposed by the historical circumstances surrounding World War II, fascism, and industrialization. J.R.R. Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892 and moved to England at the age of three. His father died when he was four and his mother died when he was twelve, leaving him in the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory, where he was raised Catholic (Garth 12). During his childhood, he cultivated a deep love for the English West Midlands and for the beauty of the natural world. He also became enchanted with the myths and legends that possessed what he referred to as “the North-western temper” (Carpenter 212). Tolkien completed his studies in English language and Literature at Oxford immediately before enlisting in the British Army in 1915, almost a year after the United Kingdom entered World War I (Shippey, Author x). By the end of his service, Tolkien had lost two of his closest friends and was himself incapacitated with trench fever. He then quickly joined the academic world, taking a position at Leeds University before receiving the Anglo-Saxon Chair at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1925 (x). He would remain at Oxford, later as a professor of English language and literature at Merton College, Oxford, until 1959. All the while, Tolkien indulged in “his hobby, his private amusement, his ruling passion,” the gradual creation of the world of Middle-earth (xi). Silverstein 3 After the strong success of The Hobbit upon its publication in 1937, Tolkien almost immediately began working on a ‘sequel’ at the suggestion of his publishers (Carpenter 25-27). This sequel, after years of growth and evolution, would become The Lord of the Rings. On the surface, The Lord of the Rings exists in a world and time of its own. The story is now well known: opening in the Shire, a young hobbit named Frodo inherits a magic ring of mysterious origins from his guardian, Bilbo Baggins, of Hobbit fame. This ring turns out to be the One Ring, forged by the evil Lord Sauron thousands of years ago. If returned to his possession, the Ring would imbue Sauron with the power to dominate Middle-earth. Sauron’s desire to retrieve the Ring leads to an alliance of men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits, all devoted to preserving their cultural autonomy, to undertake a quest to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, in which it was first forged. The quest falls to Frodo, who bears the Ring and ultimately succeeds in the quest, but not without his share of obstacles along the way. The fabricated world of The Lord of the Rings is suspended between the medieval and the modern world, and the elements of each of these worlds bounce off of each other in informative ways. Many literary reviewers who commented on The Lord of the Rings at the time of its publication posited that the text was a work of allegory, in which elements in Middle-earth corresponded directly and symbolically to features of the modern world. Tolkien adamantly and persistently denied that he wrote his work with any allegorical intentions (Carpenter 145). However, Tolkien did admit that, like all writers, he could not remain completely detached from his modern surroundings; indeed, his personal letters reveal not only an awareness of current events but also rather ardent opinions. If the text is not an allegory, how do its medieval and fantastical elements relate to the modern world, as they continue to delight readers even to this day? This paper approaches this question through the lens of medieval weapons, which Silverstein 4 persistently appear at crucial moments within the text. In the text’s depiction of these weapons, the medieval and the modern collide. The weapons themselves are medieval resonances, yet when compared with the depictions of weapons in actual medieval texts, they differ in significantly modern ways. Most literary scholars who have written on Tolkien seek, in one form or another, to answer why Tolkien’s supposedly antiquarian works resonate so deeply with modern audiences. They approach this question through a wide variety of perspectives. Some scholars focus on the way that Tolkien incorporates elements of medieval literature into the formation of his own mythological world.i Others focus on the way that his works reflect many of the prevailing concerns characteristic of the modern world.ii Still others examine the interaction between the text’s medieval and modern elements.iii I pursue this last approach. As a medievalist, Tolkien was deeply familiar with a wide range of medieval texts, and his own writing reflects their influence. A number of scholars have already done a great deal of research outlining the similarities between Tolkien’s writing and a variety of medieval texts.iv One such text, the Song of Roland, shares a lot of features in common with The Lord of the Rings: war on a grand scale, cultural groups colliding with each other, and an assemblage of many of the same kinds of weaponry and war gear. Most notably, however, the hero Roland wields the renowned sword named Durendal, while one of the heroes of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn, wields a similarly named sword, Andúril. The congruence of these two names almost encourages comparison. While both The Lord of the Rings and the Song of Roland depict medieval weapons in superficially similar ways, the cultural meanings of these weapons differ within each text.

Load more

  55

Copy Link